“It’s very exciting to be nominated, no matter what,” dishes costume designer Colleen Atwood during our recent webcam chat (watch above) about her Oscar bid for “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” The three-time winner for “Chicago” (2002), “Memoirs of a Geisha” (2005), and “Alice in Wonderland” (2010) was surprised to receive the news she had reaped her 12th career citation. “I’ve been working on something in the UK, and I forgot that it was that day,” she recalls. “Then I got the phone call, and I was like, Woah!”

A spin-off of J.K. Rowling‘s “Harry Potter” series, this David Yates-helmed period fantasy stars Eddie Redmayneas Newt Scamander, a writer in 1920s New York who discovers a secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before young Harry begins reading his books at Hogwarts.”I was designing period,” Atwood explains, “but I was putting a fantasy twist on a period as it moved into the magical world.” When it came to Redmayne’s character, “I wanted him to feel like he was otherworldly, but still pass on the street when you saw him… You wanted something special.”

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